Technology | Media | Telecommunications

Monday, March 08, 2010

With home broadband networking adoption passing 50 percent of households in North America and 13 percent worldwide, the consumer network storage (CNS) market is seeing continued growth.

Web-enabled consumer devices, such as TVs and Blu-ray players, are further diversifying the demand and applications for consumer network storage devices, according to the latest market study by In-Stat.

"Consumer network storage devices increase the content that can be stored and distributed via the home network," says Norm Bogen, In-Stat analyst. "This increases the value of the entire home network to its users, as well as enabling new applications and capabilities."

I've been working on enhancing my own content storage capabilities, and will post a review of a high-capacity USB flash drive shortly. And, I'm in the process of selecting an external mobile hard-drive storage device -- in both use cases, for my video content transport applications.

In-Stat's market study found the following:

- The consumer network storage market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 40 percent between 2009 and 2014.

- 27 percent of North American consumers that own a network-capable video game console use the devices to watch video that is stored elsewhere on the home network.

- North America was the largest CNS market in 2009. Starting in 2011, Europe will become the leading CNS market.

- Consumer network storage capacities up to 1.5 terabytes will peak in 2011, giving way to even higher capacities.